Monthly Archives: January 2012

FWIW, cross-referencing Locus Magazine’s list of 2011’s SF/F novels with the Goodreads data for each novel yielded these two lists. It’s hard to do anything about the astonishing number of urban fantasy novels that crowd the top of the rankings, because there are too many series that appeal to both typical SF/F readers and typical paranormal fiction readers. I could exclude a bunch of them arbitrarily, or I can accept that there’s an interesting question about Goodreads rankings for SF/F: why is paranormal fiction generally rated so much higher than other SF/F?

The 10 most read SF/F novels of 2011, ranked highest to lowest number of readers:

I played around with IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes scores for all films of 2011 to arrive, subjectively, at a reasonable formula for combining the two to make one list of the most highly-rated films of 2011: just multiply the unweighted IMDB score times the RT score. That allows newer / smaller films to enjoy the ratings IMDB users actually gave them while using RT to more heavily weight the field. The films that make up the top 20 don’t change much, though, whatever formula you use.